


time's a setting sun

by MathildaHilda



Category: Dark (TV 2017)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, I love my boi Jonas, Season 2 predictions-ish (kind of), Spoilers, post-Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 12:00:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16428995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: The children of the future wander, laugh and sing in the only world they’ve ever known and he shivers, because for once it doesn’t rain.





	time's a setting sun

**Author's Note:**

> Character study for Jonas Kahnwald and a little bit of predictions going for season 2
> 
> (And because I'm rubbish at waiting so I spend the time writing nonsense.)

The door is cold under his fingers and the figure feels foreign and familiar at the same time and his heart quickens alongside the wind that blows through it.

Something pulls at him and he tumbles over hidden rocks and wet leaves and time buzzes inside his head.

 

 

The future is snow and ash and there’s little he can do about any of it when there’s no way to change anything.

He doesn’t know what his older self did, and he shakes in the cold and his thin jacket and beat-up shoes and hides his face in handkerchiefs. As if one piece of fabric can keep the radiation at bay.

He wanders, something he’d done since the moment he learned how to walk, and his father took him out into the woods behind the house, and thinks about what life must’ve been like after he went back through the door and failed Mikkel. Failed himself, in other ways.

If the letter is anything to go by, he might not have failed his father completely. No matter how many times he tries to tell himself that he tried to do the right thing.

He tries to understand him and fails as much as he succeeds. The children of the future wander, laugh and sing in the only world they’ve ever known, and he shivers, because for once it doesn’t rain.

 

 

 

Milo hands him a piece of paper a few days after he falls through the wormhole and he stares back at his own face, his own name and his bright yellow raincoat. The paper is old and moldy and has an odd smell to it, and he reads the information he knows by heart and there’s a pang in his chest when his heart drop.

If he counts correctly, because the children won’t tell him, he’ll be thirty-three years in the future. He’d be nearing fifty if he’d gone the normal route. He didn’t, of course, because when was the last time things were easy?

Other pieces of paper hangs on the walls of their holdup and he reads the names of every child that’s gone missing in Winden since God knows when and he finds that they are too many to be able to save. Too many kids who’s met death by some mean or other, and he’s very certain it’s something about that chair.

He stops and stares at Ulrich and Helge and it dawns on him that he and Mikkel are not the only travelers Winden’s had who’s come out the other side.

Milo watches from a corner, arms crossed, and he can’t even fathom what runs through the other boy’s head.

 

 

 

He’s a child born of time’s mishaps, someone born from every sidestep time has taken to push back the future, even if it only works minute by minute.

Time tries to repair itself over and over, but every once in a while, a traveler stumbles and rips the seams wide open and it has to start all over.

 

 

 

He falls back and he’s grabbing dirt between pale fingers and watches blood caked under nails, thinks  _“endlich”_ and scrambles to his feet and takes off running, because people from the future never stop.

But he stops eventually, not too far from the church and breathes in air with no ash and watches the dark clouds with promises of rain and smiles for the first time in months. He almost laughs, until he sees the caretaker and then he’s gone again, heart pounding fast and feet moving even faster.

He keeps away until he realizes that maybe he doesn’t need to run.

He disappears into the woods until Charlotte finds him curled by the foot of the cave, the closest he can come to Papa and the home he’d had in the future and even in his joy of being back he watches her with a wary gaze. She approaches him in the same way one approaches a wounded animal and the first thing she asks him is when he’s been.

All he can do is stare and watch as she speaks rapidly into a radio and he doesn’t realize just how dark it is until flashlights bob in the distance.

He washes Milo’s blood down the sink, thinks of Katja’s wild eyes before the wormhole swallowed him up, chokes on scratchy ash in his throat and stares at every corner of the room until his mother sprints down the hall.

His mother cries and his grandmother is quiet and all he can do is shake his head when they ask where he’s been.

 

 

 

They find out that he should be dead.

The level of radiation in the ash he coughs up is enough to fell an adult man and they lock him away until they figure out a way to cure him. They burn his clothes from the future, and he thinks of the raincoat lost in the woods.

He stares at pale walls until someone from the reactor walks through the door in a hazmat suit and it takes him too long to realize that it’s Herr Tiedemann.

He can’t tell them where he’s been, because he’s been in Winden this whole time and he doesn’t yet know how Charlotte knew to ask  _wann_  instead of  _wo_. Time is an uncomfortable bystander in the middle of it all.

 _‘Wann ist Jonas?’_  is the question no one but Charlotte seems to have asked and the other version is a question he grows tired of too early, because the answer is simple. He’s always been in Winden and every damn time they ask he says the same thing. They rephrase the question and asks him again, and he says  _Winden_ , the cave or nothing at all.

He finds himself asking Herr Tiedemann the question a small child should be asking when the man looks at him from the corner while the doctor pricks his arm.

_‘Wo ist Papa?’_

Because despite all his misadventures, he’s still just a child with homesickness.

 

 

 

He holds his head in quiet despair and hope they never ask him the question that can force his hand.

He tells them that he can’t remember everything and that he doesn’t know how he ended up by the church for the gatekeeper to see, but he senses it has something to do with Papa.

(It takes him three days to feel the grief and fear of the future well up in his eyes.

It takes him three days to calm down and leave his shaking hands in his lap and his eyes from stop seeing gunpowder, smoke and something charred beyond recognition.)

He had asked them what they thought was different between what they knew of the past and the future that he didn’t know, and Leo had piped up “ _keine Flugzeuge_ ”, made the sound of one with his lips and taken off running around the campfire with the metal toy in his hands. The airplane dove and parried his imagination before crashing into Katja’s head when she reprimanded him and told him to stay close and quiet. She had thought for a moment and said pizza, because at least that made him laugh.

The toy rests in the evidence room, one of the few things still in his tattered backpack, and when they ask him to identify where it comes from, all he can do is turn away and hide his eyes in his hands. Charlotte tells him that the toy has a manufacturing date five years from now, but that’s only the extent of what she knows, he thinks and swallows hard.

Call him a child, a missing boy, whatever. But don’t ever say that he didn’t care about the child who’d held the plane.

 

 

 

It’s been almost a year, they said. He’d stared at them, expecting more time or maybe even less, and asked about the others.

Asked about Ulrich. About Helge. Ulrich was back, bloody and bruised and quiet, but Helge Doppler was nowhere to be found. And all he did was nod and not tell them that he suspected that maybe he wouldn’t come back at all.

He didn’t ask about Yasin or Erik. He didn’t ask about Mikkel. He didn’t answer Katharina's frantic attempts to form questions about her son,  _Papa_ , and Ulrich stared from so far away that Jonas thought it was a wonder he was even there at all.

They have the same eyes; he thinks later when the Nielsen’s have left, and Martha stopped staring holes into walls and Magnus stopped pressing his nails deep into his palms until they almost bled.

Not just because they are related, but because they’ve both been through the door and seen the other side and then returned.

They both held the aftermath of war in their pale eyes, even if there was no war around them.

 

 

 

He pokes the flower Ulrich places in front of him with great interest, mouth slightly open and eyes a little wider. He thinks, for a moment, of the joy that would’ve lit up Leo’s eyes. He doesn’t see how Ulrich steels his jaw and swallows hard, but he looks up enough to read the pain.

“ _Wann warst du?_ ” Ulrich asks and he stares away, the yellow petal between light fingers. “ _Wann warst_ du _?_ ” He asks him and looks up again and now it’s Ulrich’s turn to look away.

“ _Er kommt nicht zurück oder?_ ” He asks and Jonas doesn’t know when he crushed the petal between his fingers. It falls down on the table in a flurry of broken pieces and he shakes his head.

“ _Nein_.” He says and Ulrich lets out a loud breath, as if he’d been expecting the answer at the same as not.

He turns to leave him with the flower, but that one question opened up a door Jonas didn’t know he’d been pushing shut.

“ _Ich sah ihn. Ich wollte ihn zurückbringen._ ” Ulrich turns and stares and they lock eyes.

“ _Aber ich konnte nicht_.” He whispers and picks another petal from the yellow flower.

Ulrich doesn’t hear the apology he makes, and he thinks that maybe that’s for the best

**Author's Note:**

> Translations
> 
> Endlich – Finally  
> Wann ist Jonas? – When is Jonas?  
> Wo ist Papa? – Where is dad?  
> Wann warst du? – When were you?  
> Er kommt nicht zurück, oder? – He’s not coming back, is he?  
> Ich sah ihn. Ich wollte ihn zurückbringen. – I saw him. I wanted to bring him back.  
> Aber ich konnte nicht. – But I couldn’t.
> 
>  
> 
> Please feel free to tell me if any of the translations turned out wrong! German isn't my first language, so any help or suggestions are more than welcome!


End file.
